Om mani padme hum ...

I'm debugging a program and am seeing this message: 

panic: malloc at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.6/Carp/Heavy.pm line 61.
Debugged program terminated.

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The code at line 61 of Carp::Heavy is: 

  $arg =~ s/([[:cntrl:]]|[[:^ascii:]])/sprintf("\\x{%x}",ord($1))/eg;

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and it is preceded by a comment: 

  # The following handling of "control chars" is direct from
  # the original code - I think it is broken on Unicode though.
  # Suggestions?

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The whole module of course starts with the legendary words: 

  heavy machinery, no user serviceable parts inside

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I've searched around a bit without finding anything about my problem. Neither my code nor data does anything with Unicode; it's all ASCII AFAIK. I'm running perl v5.8.6. Can anybody suggest an approach to this problem?

Thanks, Dave

PS I see that the latest version of Carp::Heavy on CPAN has slightly different code that mentions utf8, but it still has the same comment!

In reply to Carp::Heavy panic: malloc Unicode? by Dave Howorth

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